Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Pittsburgh based artist, Angela Washko, opening September 15th. Featuring Washko’s latest iteration of her video game The Game: The Game, the exhibition invites audiences to engage with the world of pick-up artists from the point of view of a femme presenting person. The opening will feature a public conversation between Washko and artist Stephanie Rothenberg. A newly commissioned essay by Dorothy Santos accompanies the exhibit.

The Game: The Game is a video game presenting the practices of several prominent seduction coaches (aka pick-up artists or PUAs) through the format of a dating simulator. In the game these pick-up gurus attempt to seduce the player using their signature techniques taken verbatim from their instructional books and video materials. The game sets up the opportunity for players to explore the complexity of the construction of social behaviors around dating as well as the experience of being a femme-presenting individual navigating this complicated terrain.

The Game: The Game is a continuation of BANGED, a two year-long project during which Angela Washko interviewed Bang series author and manosphere figurehead Roosh V, and tried to get in contact with his alleged sexual partners. After working on BANGED, the black and white ways in which this field has been portrayed through the media seemed too simple and unfair to all parties who encountered it and provoked this question: Is practicing “game” inherently wrong and dishonest, or can it be practiced in a way that simply levels the dating playing field in favor of those who are otherwise socially or physically disadvantaged? By disguising the most notorious PUAs alongside “game-less” individuals and PUAs-in-training, and placing the player into the often unsafe position of trying to distinguish between them all, Washko hopes to add levels of complexity to public conversations around both pick-up and feminism which have both found themselves presented in highly polarized, dichotomous positions in mainstream media.

“One of the most fascinating aspects of The Game: The Game is the ability to respond to words taken verbatim from Pick-up Artist (PUA) instructionals. PUA culture may seem marginal to most, restricted to specialized DVDs and obscure internet forums, however interacting with The Game: The Game provides a much more subtle understanding of these social behaviors in our culture. Dating-simulators have a history of depicting disturbing behavior, presented with a normalizing touch and from the perspective of a male; The Game: the Game, has players embody a woman who is the target of PUA’s, upending the genre’s conventions. The images–abstract, dark, with disturbing or absurd details, and static like most dating-sims–work in tandem with Xiu Xiu’s low beats and drones to illustrate a systemic nature to the behaviors on display. Crucially, the game’s depiction of male aggression is anything but simple. Washko’s long-term research has been about bridging communities – in this case feminists and the manosphere – to understand each other outside of their echo chambers. The multiple paths and possibilities in the game allows the player to safely explore these behaviors through replays. It’s an essential work, giving us a nuanced view of how desire, violence, and complicity function in our day to day lives.” – Ekrem Serdar

Biography of Angela Washko
Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward it. Since 2012, Washko has operated The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an ongoing intervention inside the most popular online role-playing game of all time. Washko’s most recent project, The Game: The Game is a video game presenting the practices of several prominent seduction coaches (aka pick-up artists) through the format of a dating simulator. In the game these pick-up gurus attempt to seduce the player using their signature techniques taken verbatim from their instructional books and video materials.
A recent recipient of a Franklin Furnace Performance Fund Grant, a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and a Rhizome Internet Art Microgrant, Washko’s practice has been highlighted in Art in America, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, ARTnews, The Hairpin, VICE, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, the New York Times, Neural Magazine and more. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her writing has been published in Creative Time Reports, FIELD Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, Copenhagen University Peer Reviewed Journal (NTIK), Neural Magazine, VASA Journal of Images and Culture, .dpi Feminist Magazine of Art and Digital Culture, ANIMAL NY and more.

In the two short years since Casey Riordan Millard’s iconic Shark Girl arrived in Western New York, the sculpture has been so widely shared and experienced that it is now one of Buffalo’s best-known citizens. However, it is perhaps less well-know that Shark Girl has served as one of Millard’s principal artistic motifs for more than a decade. The exhibition Shark Girl: Never Quite There explores Millard’s many depictions of Shark Girl, including works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and installations. Ranging from some of Millard’s earliest representations of her signature character to newly imagined diorama-style installations, this exhibition presents the many facets of Shark Girl’s eccentric, flawed, and altogether extraordinary personality.

The Albright-Knox is organizing the first large-scale museum exhibition in North America devoted to the work of Joe Bradley (American, born 1975). This mid-career survey celebrates an artist respected for his mutable approach to the practice of painting. Bradley’s work includes expressionistic canvases that record the detritus and spontaneity of the studio environment; drum-taut, subtly figurative send-ups of Minimalist painting; starkly primitive glyphs drawn in grease pencil on unprimed canvas and related drawings on paper; graphic silkscreen paintings; and modular Minimalist aluminum sculptures that Bradley pairs with textual directives.

The artist’s shifting approach can be seen as central to his practice: he uncovers, adopts, and mines the different guises that previous abstract painters have made available to an artist of his generation. This will be the first exhibition to allow viewers to perceive the complexity and richness of Bradley’s unique approach to language, abstraction, and the evolutions of style.

About the Artist

Joe Bradley has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including a solo museum exhibition at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2014, and group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; MoMA P.S.1, Queens, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany. Bradley was raised in Maine and pursued his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

After its presentation at the Albright-Knox, the exhibition will travel to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.

This exhibition is organized by Senior Curator Cathleen Chaffee.

Drawing: The Beginning of Everything

Jul 8 - Oct 15, 2017

An exhibition focused on works from the collection using the concept of drawing as artistic process.

The notion that drawing is simply a preparatory stage for painting or sculpture has long since been cast aside. The act of placing a pen or pencil to a surface is, for many artists, both a formative and driving experience. With an emphasis on works created within the last 30 years, Drawing: The Beginning of Everything is the first Albright-Knox exhibition to highlight this area of the museum’s collection.

The approaches of contemporary artists to the medium are increasingly rooted in concepts, characteristics, and meditative techniques that result in compelling and intensely personal imagery. Their varied practices promote mark-making as a constructive exploration of surface, space, composition, and scale. Additionally, this exhibition considers the ways in which drawing is employed as a means to push the boundaries that traditionally separate one artistic discipline from another by expanding beyond the page and into the realms of performance, photography, sculpture, film, and video.

Out of Sight! Art of the Senses brings together contemporary works of art that actively engage with how our bodies meet the wider world through the five basic senses. The artists in this exhibition have created experiences that incorporate viewers into the creative process, inviting them to become fully immersed in art that must be smelled, tasted, heard, and felt. The exhibition will feature historical and contemporary works to illustrate the many ways artists have steadily challenged the almost exclusive association of art with visual experience through performance, sound, and interactive and installation-based practices over the past four decades.

Many of the most important highlights from the late 20th century by artists such as Lucas Samaras, Nam June Paik, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres will provide a historical framework for more recent artworks. Out of Sight! Art of the Senses focuses on the state of interaction as a tool consciously used by artists to engage with audiences. The intimacy of these artworks appeals to the senses—we feel, taste, smell, or hear each of them on a highly personal level—while it also renegotiates the terms of spectatorship and the relationship between contemporary art and everyday life.